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'On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents'. As Henry James surveys London in 1888, he sums up what had fascinated urban observers for a century: the random and even accidental development of this unprecedented form of human settlement, the modern metropolis. By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis takes James at his word, arguing that accident was both a powerful metaphor and material context through which the Victorians arrested the paradoxes of metropolitan modernity and reconfigured understandings of form and change. Paul Fyfe shows how the material conditions of urban accidents offer new and compelling modes of analysis for intellectual and literary history. Through extensive archival study and interdisciplinary analysis of urban-industrial accidents, risk management, and civic improvements, By Accident or Design reclaims the metropolis as ground zero for some of the most important thinking about causation in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates the centrality of interdependent concepts of design and accident not only to metropolitan discourse, but also to current critical discourse about the formal and circulatory dynamics of Victorian metropolitan writing. Thus, this book offers a new vocabulary for the dialectics of the modern city and the signature forms of writing about it, including the newspaper, the illustrated periodical, the industrial novel, and urban broadsheets.
In this reflective autobiography, Rosemary Sassoon, a leading expert on handwriting and typography, looks back on her long and varied career, paying special attention to her unorthodox progression through a variety of fields. She details the route that took her from design to the educational and medical aspects of handwriting problems, then on to research and a PhD and finally to working in the area of legibility in type design. In telling the story of an unusual and unusually successful life, Sassoon takes up a number of philosophical questions about what it is that comes together to form our characters, and what role chance and coincidence play in our lives.
An examination of different theoretical, methodological and practical approaches towards the management of risk. Seven dimensions of the debate are identified, and the case for each position is put forward, the whole discussion being set in context and perspective. This volume attempts to identify and juxtapose the contested doctrines and underlying assumptions in the field of risk management.
Engaging essays that roam across uncertain territory, in search of sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, plagiarized tabernacles, and other phenomena missing from architectural history. This collection by “architectural history's most beguiling essayist” (as Reinhold Martin calls the author in the book's foreword) illuminates the unfamiliar, the arcane, the obscure—phenomena largely missing from architectural and landscape history. These essays by Edward Eigen do not walk in a straight line, but roam across uncertain territory, discovering sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, unvisited shores, plagiarized tabernacles. Taken together, these texts offer a group portrait of how certain things fall apart. We read about the statistical investigation of lightning strikes in France by the author-astronomer Camille Flammarion, which leads Eigen to reflect also on Foucault, Hamlet, and the role of the anecdote in architectural history. We learn about, among other things, Olmsted's role in transforming landscape gardening into landscape architecture; the connections among hedging, hedge funds, the High Line, and GPS bandwidth; timber-frame roofs and (spider) web-based learning; the archives of the Houses of Parliament through flood and fire; and what the 1898 disappearance and reappearance of the Trenton, New Jersey architect William W. Slack might tell us about the conflict between “the migratory impulse” and “love of home.” Eigen compares his essays to the “gathering up of seeds that fell by the wayside.” The seedlings that result create in the reader's imagination a dazzling display of the particular, the contingent, the incidental, and the singular, all in search of a narrative.
This book takes a scientific look at safety leadership. Part one is an analysis of seven safety leadership practices that don¿t work and what to do instead. Part two presents a model for effective safety leadership and culture change.
Virilio defines the ways in which postindustrial science has merged with out-and-out hyperterrorism to threaten the foundations of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian civilisation, and the future of the planet with them, through innovation of mass catastrophes that are part and parcel of its panoply of inventions.
"The most perverse perversions are not always those one would expect. At once clinical, bewildering, hilarious and deeply poignant, Overexposed shows how science can pervert itself by identifying too closely with its object, pushing along the way the limits assigned to humanity. This insider's exposition of a controversial cognitive behavioral method is a hallucinatory document on the manner in which our society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure. Are we all already living in a sex laboratory?"--BOOK JACKET.
Accidents are preventable, but only if they are correctly described and understood. Since the mid-1980s accidents have come to be seen as the consequence of complex interactions rather than simple threads of causes and effects. Yet progress in accident models has not been matched by advances in methods. The author's work in several fields (aviation, power production, traffic safety, healthcare) made it clear that there is a practical need for constructive methods and this book presents the experiences and the state-of-the-art. The focus of the book is on accident prevention rather than accident analysis and unlike other books, has a proactive rather than reactive approach. The emphasis on design rather than analysis is a trend also found in other fields. Features of the book include: -A classification of barrier functions and barrier systems that will enable the reader to appreciate the diversity of barriers and to make informed decisions for system changes. -A perspective on how the understanding of accidents (the accident model) largely determines how the analysis is done and what can be achieved. The book critically assesses three types of accident models (sequential, epidemiological, systemic) and compares their strengths and weaknesses. -A specific accident model that captures the full complexity of systemic accidents. One consequence is that accidents can be prevented through a combination of performance monitoring and barrier functions, rather than through the elimination or encapsulation of causes. -A clearly described methodology for barrier analysis and accident prevention. Written in an accessible style, Barriers and Accident Prevention is designed to provide a stimulating and practical guide for industry professionals familiar with the general ideas of accidents and human error. The book is directed at those involved with accident analysis and system safety, such as managers of safety departments, risk and safety consultants, human factors professionals, and accident investigators. It is applicable to all major application areas such as aviation, ground transportation, maritime, process industries, healthcare and hospitals, communication systems, and service providers.
Presents an examination of American novels and nonfiction texts, published between 1947 and 2005, that looks at the concept of chance and how it was denied in the Soviet Union.